Name: VMware Live Recovery
Brand: Broadcom
Rating: 4.0 (82 reviews)

it_user175104

Associate Consultant with 51-200 employees

Dec 23, 2014

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You avoid costly and time consuming DR recovery tests but vSphere needs additional scalability for smaller sites

What is most valuable?

Key feature for me is the ability to test recovery plans with zero impact to the production running environment, this is key for 'what-if’ type analysis and to provide confidence that the platform can be recovered with minimal intervention.

How has it helped my organization?

Organisations that have implemented SRM in my experience have confidence that their mission critical systems will be recovered within the given SLA in the event of a planned or unplanned availability event. This avoids costly and time consuming DR recovery tests which are also often unrepresentative of the real scenario.

What needs improvement?

Smaller sites or sites with mixed storage platforms rely on vSphere replication for DR purposes so additional scalability in this tool would benefit from this.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have designed and implemented 3 solutions with this product over the last 3 years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

More around vSphere replication than SRM

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and support?

VMware Tech Support is excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

For VMware environments there is no other option for integrated/automated DR other than 'roll your own.'

How was the initial setup?

SRM setup is straight forward, SRA (storage integration) can be more complex depending on the array in question.

What about the implementation team?

I was working for the vendor.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Consider your storage design and replication policy first and as always make sure you review VMware documentation and HCL for compatibility.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user175035

System Engineer at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 23, 2014

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Easily create test environments with the SRM test functionality but auto guest customizations through a GUI is missing

What is most valuable?

The automatic activation of the storage volumes and bringing up all VM’s. The recovery plans and resource mapping are good features.

With the resource mapping we can use different networks to bring up our VM’s

How has it helped my organization?

We can easily create a test environment with the SRM testing functionality, also in combination with EMC recoverpoint we can start up a virtual machine to a given point in time.

What needs improvement?

Automatic guest customizations through a GUI is a missing feature. Also the new version of SRM is web-only and is not that stable as the old client version.

We had couple of times that the web interface crashed and needed to restart the services.

For how long have I used the solution?

7 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No, but the new web client is sometime ‘buggy.'

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

We needed to use customer service a couple of times while upgrading versions but all went fine.

Technical Support:

8/10

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No previous solution used.

How was the initial setup?

It wasn't complex.

What about the implementation team?

We used a vendor team and their expertise was good.

What was our ROI?

This product makes it easy for us to have a managed DR. Also the point in time functionality to bring up vm’s is a cost-saving method for us during the upgrade / testing period.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No other options evaluated.

What other advice do I have?

Read and follow the admin guide, otherwise when you miss a step you can search long time. Also use the correct storage adapter of your storage vendor.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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Learn what your peers think about VMware Live Recovery. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.

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it_user174720

Owner with 51-200 employees

Dec 23, 2014

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Implementation is not difficult as long as you know the business requirements

What is most valuable?

Disaster recovery of a failed site.

How has it helped my organization?

None, I implement this product for customers.

What needs improvement?

Storage integration.

For how long have I used the solution?

5 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

The integration (SRA’s) with storage and it’s versions.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

None encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

None encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

9 out of 10.

Technical Support:

9 out of 10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Just a regular backup product. But this wasn't a disaster recovery solution.

How was the initial setup?

A SRM implementation is not difficult. Getting the business requirements is more of a challenge.

What about the implementation team?

I was the implementor.

What was our ROI?

For most customers about 2 years.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don’t know as it depends on the customer.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Nope, I was asked to implement this solution.

What other advice do I have?

Know your business requirements.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. VMWare Partner

it_user166617

Senior IT Infrastructure Solutions at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 30, 2014

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Able to provide customers with required RPO, not possible with traditional backup solutions. Stability could be better.

What is most valuable?

Instant VMware integration and a wide integration with storage vendors.

How has it helped my organization?

The company was able to provide customers with the required RPO that was not possible with traditional backup solutions.

What needs improvement?

Stability, speed.

For how long have I used the solution?

4 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Bugs bugs bugs...

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Sometimes the vm would not failover.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No backwards compatibility of different versions, this made scaling a bit difficult as we needed to upgrade existing infrastructure all the time.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

3/10, VMware support was not really proficient in the product, as most of the time we would give them the solution.

Technical Support:

3/10, VMware support was not really proficient in the product, as most of the time we would give them the solutio

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No.

How was the initial setup?

The integration with EMC recoverpoint was problematic in the beginning, with vm's not failing over all the time and slow recover times.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, Zerto, Veeam.

What other advice do I have?

POC and test.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. I've worked on projects for various companies including competitors such as HP

it_user166620

Senior IT Virtualization Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Nov 30, 2014

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Easy to use and with lowest RPO can protect the main site; add a function to detect the business critical applications.

What is most valuable?

Centralized recovery plans for thousands of VMs, Non-disruptive recovery testing, Automated DR workflows.

How has it helped my organization?

Lowers the cost of DR management, Eliminates clexity and risk of manual processes, Enables fast and highly predictable RTOs.

What needs improvement?

In my opinion if Vmware added some function to detect the business critical applications like oracle, exchange to help monitor these applications for disaster recovery .

For how long have I used the solution?

7 years on many international projects.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

In the earlier versions I had some issue, however all of them resolved now.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Excellent, I had some issues for trouble shooting which was far from my knowledge and vmware customer service remotely solved the problem.

Technical Support:

Excellent

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Yes, I used other products like Storage replications or some other software like "double take.” The problem with storage replication was that it was so risky and unstable to manually bring the application up on DR site, besides taking more time to restore.

Other software, like double take, we needed to do lot of effort on each application separately which makes the solution more complex.

How was the initial setup?

In some basic installations, it is very straightforward, but for enterprise customers it makes sense to do some extra steps to protect applications and boot order.

What about the implementation team?

Both, In my experience vendor teams like HP, EMC or net app, didn’t have much experience with this product, especially for the last 5 years, I mainly have to help them understand the solution.

What was our ROI?

Based on average of downtime cost on DR and how automation can help to bring the business on, SRM can reduce the cost nearly 50 percent; moreover you don’t need to have SAN storage on DR.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Setup cost was based on number of vms and protection plan, and if communication DR site has no any issue, within two weeks all setup can normally be finished and cost is around $300- $350 per day.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

For some customer who want to protect small number of of applications, I will recommend to go with vendor disaster recovery solution, like Oracle data guard for oracle DB or Microsoft exchange replication or SQL log shipping for Microsoft SQL products.

What other advice do I have?

Vmware SRM can handle all of the challenge of replication and disaster recovery in a simple way.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user165579

Senior Systems Engineer at a media company with 501-1,000 employees

Nov 26, 2014

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The setup documentation needs to be improved greatly but the ability to support DR is valuable to our organization.

What is most valuable?

Ability to support DR.

How has it helped my organization?

We have a fully functioning DR environment.

What needs improvement?

The setup documentation needs to be improved greatly.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Only the fact that I had scour the Internet to find the proper setup information.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Average.

Technical Support:

Well the tech I spoke to did not know how the setup should be implemented, until I found the literature myself.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Did not use a previous solution.

How was the initial setup?

Complex - settings for the sql db were not documented - had to search a lot for those.

What about the implementation team?

I implemented the product.

What was our ROI?

Very good - we have a DR platform that we've tested with a live production workflow.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

No others were evaluated.

What other advice do I have?

Gather the proper setup information.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user165303

Senior Consultant at a recruiting/HR firm with 51-200 employees

Nov 25, 2014

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The recovery plans and customization options are great. I also the love the re-protect feature for easier fallback.

What is most valuable?

The recovery plans and customization options. I also the love the re-protect feature for easier fallback.

How has it helped my organization?

We were able to migrate 100 virtual servers to our St. Louis office with very little downtime.

What needs improvement?

I would like to see the database come built-in to the product. I would also prefer to the SRM server come as a virtual appliance instead of a windows vm. I would also like to see a way to control bandwidth usage.

For how long have I used the solution?

3 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No, the process is very well documented.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No, but you need to have a good understanding of your bandwidth between sites. SRM does not have a native way to throttle bandwidth usage.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Excellent.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We looked at various types of solutions like Veeam, DoubleTake and Neverfail.

How was the initial setup?

It was very straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

In-house.

What was our ROI?

We were able to reduce the cost of our overall DR infrastructure while increase our recovery time. We are seeing a 25% return.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, Veeam, Neverfail and DoubleTake.

What other advice do I have?

Take the time to understand your change rate of your servers, your bandwidth capabilities and the recovery objects for your DR plan.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user159711

Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Nov 18, 2014

SRM - standard disaster recovery for VMware

Most VMware administrators have heard of Site Recovery Manager (SRM). SRM has been the standard in disaster recovery for some time. It plays into VMware’s parent company’s (EMC) product line, traditionally leveraging storage based replication. This architecture leverages write journaling technology we spoke of in our first article in the series, so Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) could be very aggressive.

The down side to this architecture is that the customer has to have similar storage arrays at both the production and disaster recovery site. If for example the customer had a fiber channel array on the production side, and a lower grade NFS array from a different vendor on the other side SRM was not compatible Bummer…

VMware however released vSphere replication in the vSphere 5 family suite and allowed administrators to replicate their virtual machines without common storage subsystems. What this means is that you could have your traditional fibre channel SAN on the production side, and NFS, or internal storage on your disaster recovery site. The underlying storage type is completely irrelevant as long as the workload is supported. This is a gift for DR budgets everywhere. Additionally you can recover to previous points in time using snapshots at the recovery site much the same as you would use a traditional snapshot.

SRM in thie configuration sits on top of the vSphere replication instead of RPAs that are common in array to array based architectures. These replication appliances are Linux virtual machines that are deployed in the VMware environment. I will give VMware a large amount of credit here, where some competing technologies are cumbersome to install, vSphere replication installation takes only a few mouse clicks. Your vSphere replication appliances are functional in just a few minutes. Replication can be configured through the VMware fat client or the web client.

So what’s the catch? vSphere replication would fall into the snap and replicate category. This means that RTOs and RPOs wont be as aggressive as with array to array based replciation, or hypervisor technologies that use write journaling. The current RTOs and RPOs that can be achieved by vSphere replication with SRM over vSphere replication is 15 minutes. There are rumors that this will be coming down to 5 minutes in the future, but it’s only a rumor at this point. Also if you are trying to move to the web client then you will dismayed to learn that SRM can still only be managed through the VMware fat client. I don’t know to many administrators that are excited about the web client, but it’s a relevant piece of information for your day to day work.

So what about the licensing and additional costs? There are pros and cons to the vSphere replication / SRM model.

The virtual appliances are Linux based – pro

This means there aren’t additional Windows licenses required to operate the environment. Some of the other products use Windows based virtual appliances. When you have to stand up more Windows servers you have to patch and manage them, this adds to the cost of the solution. SRM can generally be installed on your Windows system that vCenter runs on. If you’re using the Linux based vCenter appliance SRM isn’t compatable. I would expect this to be resolved soon as VMware is trying to eliminate the need for Windows systems in the environment.

The base vSphere replication is free – pro

Yes you heard that correct, vSphere replication is free. If you have lower priority virtual machines you don’t have to buy SRM licenses. This means you can save money and buy only the SRM licenses (sold in packs of 25) for your mission critical VMs.

SRM is the orchestration tool on top of vSpherer replication – nutural

SRM and all of it’s power can be scoped down to only the systems you need it for. I personally like the flexability and choice, most companies don’t need to replicate all of their virtual machines with very tight RTOs and RPOs. If you are trying to replicate your entire VMware environment, you maybe better off with a solution that licenses by socket as it maybe more cost effective.

Snap and replicate technology – con

At the end of the day snap and replicate technologies are limited. Because the recovered virtual machine ends up with snapshots scalability can be an issue. Let’s look at an example.

VMware recommends that you only have 21 snapshots at a maximum using vSphere replication. More snapshots than this can lead to snapshot consolidation issues. If you wanted to have a recovery point every hour, you wouldn’t be able to recover your virtual machine to a point further back than 21 hours. This a limitation of any snaphost based replication technology not a defiency with in SRM or vSphere replication.

Scalability – neutral

The upper limit to SRM with vSphere replication is 1000 virtual machines. This will suit most enterprises; however, for very large scale deployments this may not be enough. SRM with storage array replication for example can support up to 1500 vitual machines. This limit is roughly about what you would get with any other snap and replication technology. In my personal experience Veeam starts to have problems after 300 virtual machines in a single instance.

Speaking of Veeam this is the next technology that we will discuss. Veeam is a good product that not only provides DR capabilities, but also a very mature backup solution. Join us for our next article in the series.

Originally published here: https://simplecontinuity.com/dr-for-vmware-srm-on-vsphere-replication/

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user174999VMware NSX T/V Consulting Engineer /Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Sep 4, 2016

Nice article - I recently have been looking at Vsan as a viable option for lab POC. Some DRaaS customers have a need to replicate/recover specific workloads outside of the SRM protected groups so they can control failover testing. In real world I do not see many customers using vsphere native replication in conjunction with SRA San layer replication. Vsan requires 3 host Minimum and works with vsphere replication.

Vsphere replication nice free to use pro for sure. Limited use cases as far as enterprise production recovery. Perhaps vsphere replication and vsan combination is low cost future of DRaaS?

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